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We’ve officially hit, I believe, cold wintry weather. With lows in the 30s at night, and the grinding of bone and cartilage in my knees, it’s kind of a hard thing to miss.

My pain management, however, has taken the unfortunate turn of now having to take the meds as soon as I get up because I’m waking up to anything from lower back and full leg pain to whole body joint inflammation. I’m calling my doctor after the holiday – I need new X-rays done on my back and now both my knees. It feels like I’m getting stabbed in the patella with a very thin knife every time I bend my knees to walk or sit. Heaven forbid I need to kneel down on the floor for something.

Now, I know I could have hurt myself when dealing with my kitchen, but this was a problem before doing all that hard labor cleaning (well, hard labor for me these days anyway).

I know some of you deal with far worse pain on a daily basis (one of you in particular I would never wish your condition on my worst enemy because holy fuck that’s… I honestly can’t even imagine what you deal with guy) but keep in mind we all start somewhere which chronic pain before hitting that point of “whelp, this is my life now then I guess”. I’m hoping that the majority of this is just due to the cold weather aggravating my pre-existing problems rather than the normal evolution thereof. I can hope!

As a result of adjusting my medications to compensate my body’s been doing the whole “it takes 2 weeks to readjust to this shit” sort of thing so I’ve been sleeping weird times.

Plus side, I’ve gotten some kitting done, and some writing too. So score one for the bonus team!

Thankfully my mom, also chronic pain sufferer, is off on Wednesday and Thursday. Together we make 1/2 of a functioning human being which incidentally is all you need to pull a Thanksgiving dinner together.

One week ago I began cleaning my kitchen. Not a typical wipe down and mop job. Oh no. A full on deep strip clean. Literally scrubbing the walls from top to bottom and within an inch of their lives. Treating them with anti mold and mildew chemicals because the owner (we rent) used poor quality primer instead of real paint and after exposing my walls to all that water and bleach I don’t want to risk problems down the road.

Weeding through pots, pans, and containers that overflow from the shelves we installed a few years ago and taking out ones that we simply have too many of, don’t use, or for containers – no matching lids.

I’m also going through the cabinets. Going to pare down the dishes, especially the cups. We don’t have space to put them all. I need to fix that. Also going through the food and disposing of things that have been there so long that they can’t be used anymore. Then I’m scrubbing those out, too.

And THEN I’ll scrub and mop the floor.

The reason for all of this? I’m not having the best time of it mental health wise, and my marriage could be in better shape (communication issues). And I just feel like I’m losing control over my life. All of my hobbies have gone to the wayside because I’m always having to take care of everyone else. On top of this my pain issues have gotten worse, causing me to be even more limited in my movement and activity level. What energy I have goes into child rearing and errands. Hell, most of the time I have just enough energy left in me to make a cup of coffee – only because it literally requires adding a pod to my machine and hitting one button – and making lunch or dinner for my son.

Hell, I hardly can keep my eyes open most days to make a note to myself to make a draft of a blog post here.

So, my kitchen cleaning has been about taking back control of something in my life that I alone decide how it’s done, when it’s done, and where it goes from there. It’s also about learning where my limits are now and which ones I can push through and which ones I can’t anymore.

Since starting the project I’ve noticed a remarkable side benefit. It has helped me to work through my emotions so that I do not fall immediately into the knee-jerk reaction scenarios. It has also helped me with my focus, and allowed me productive time to myself. When I have taken breaks while doing the hardest parts of the work I actually got a lot of writing done. Enough that I was actually surprised that I’d written most of a story without meaning to.

I plan to paint the kitchen next month with a glossy pastel green paint so that it’s easier to clean and won’t require so much elbow grease next time.

I haven’t posted anything since the 6th. And that’s a bit of a shame. Life as it does got in the way. My son had ear tubes put in last Wednesday, and the Thursday before that he had a dentist appointment. Next week I hope to get him back on his normal schedule with his therapist with so much going on this last month and a half with him I had to make a judgement call on how much I can actually handle in a week. All the other appointments we’re far more important.

In other news PayPal is being a dick about giving me my card reader so I went with Square. It will be here soon I hope. Then I can finally accept cards for payment on my readings.

Yesterday was a great day for me. My mom had a day off that was truly a day off. She and I also needed new phones. So we went down to MetroPCS since it was getting harder to find a TracFone that fit her needs. We got 2 phones that were under $100 for free because I changed providers and ported my number over from Safelink. All we had to pay was 1 month service, activation, and tax. What was expected to be a $300 trip became $150!

After that we went out to lunch at IHOP and had a fun time of me teaching mom how to program phone numbers into her phone and what apps are useful for her (like the one for our bank!).

We then went across the street to Kroger’s and did a bit of shopping. She knocked over a vase of fall flowers, then a pot of orchids! We had Starbucks and got a Crock-Pot with owls on it. And had a wonderful me and mom day, something we haven’t had in months.

And now I’m addicted to a game called PocketMortys, which is like Pokémon but is RickandMorty themed.

Ah, it’s been quite a while hasn’t it? I’ve gone since the 9th without so much as a how do you do here. Life gets in the way, you know? That’s pretty much always the reason these days.

It’s been pretty hectic of late. Doctor visits all over the place, dealing with my son’s SSI case, dealing with his school, mom’s work schedule, my insomnia and back issues. Ugh.

Recently I’ve mainly had sleeping issues – or lack of sleep thereof. It’s the same old story – insomnia. I was going days at a time with little to no sleep (and when I say little I mean maybe 20mins cat naps every 12 hours if I was lucky). I just simply didn’t have the time to sleep because there was so much I had to do.

This week is no different – only that it is. I went two days without sleep, just to force my body to get enough sleep a few days before having to drive out to Rome, GA this morning/yesterday morning. It helped. Downside? I’m up at 3AM after falling asleep before 10PM. Can’t get back to sleep at all. And if I take something to make me go back to sleep, I won’t hear the 6AM alarm to get my son up and out the door for school.

Plus side to all of this though? In the wee hours of the morning I finally, FINALLY, get some time to myself. I get to read, write, watch my shows, relax and have a hot cuppa, fill out any paperwork I need to fill out for the latest round of doctors.

Just yesterday morning I was able to sit and watch the Game of Thrones season 7 finale (TORMUND!!!!! NO!!!!!) without having to yell at people to be quiet or leave me alone, or stop eating paper, or stop peeling the paint off the window sill, or leave the dog alone, or get up to fetch someone a snack, food, drink, make dinner, put all the DVDs back where they belong, etc. (And no, not all of that is directed at or about a certain rambunctious toddler either).

It’s a bit refreshing to get this time to myself, like this morning. I can think. I can plan out my day. I can catch up on my favorite fanficton stories where I delete an entire paragraph I just wrote here because holy crap I didn’t realize I loved the Tormund character from GoT so freaking much. I just want him and Brienne to get together and have big blond and ginger babies and the house of Tarth to just be these awesome badass warriors like the Mormonts because holy fuck Brienne needs to just be loved for who she is and Tormund totally is down for that.

And that’s where I’m going to end this post otherwise I’m going to lament the end of GoT season 7 and what may or may not be the fate of my favorite wildling.

Well then. A lot’s happened, and this won’t be in any particular order as such simply because I don’t smegging want to put it in any sort of order.

My son went back to school last week after a summer of fighting sleep until 6AM. He’s behaving himself in school, engaging with the other children, and even riding the bus this year! He has the same teacher in the same classroom, and most of the same kids in his class – it’s the special education pre-k program. We’ll be setting up an IEP meeting this month to go over reclassification now that he has his proper diagnosis.

My local movie theatre went from being a Carmike to an AMC, and I hate it. The price hike is ridiculous, and the movies are in theatre for one week only (if we’re lucky). This sucks because by the time I’ll have money to see The Dark Tower, it’ll not be at the theatre anymore. and our car sucks so badly I can’t drive to a theatre out of town either.

As for husband, he’s finally hit the “midlife crisis” point in life. He’s 43, and finally hitting that wall. Thank goodness he already bagged himself a wife younger than him!

Mom moved back to second shift, which is both a blessing and a curse. After a summer of having a set routine and schedule based around her working the overnights, I now have to offset my laundry day every other week. And that is annoying. Though at least I’m more likely to get a date night with my husband once a month again so there’s that.

And lastly…. Britbox. No, this post isn’t sponsored or anything, but I just have to talk about this service because honestly I genuinely hate streaming services like Netflix and Hulu and such because they NEVER have the stuff I want t watch on them. And when they do, it’s always the same stuff. Why would I need to stream Sherlock when between my mother and I we own the entire series? Why stream Doctor Who when between my mother and I we have series 1-9? (Waiting on getting 10 for Christmas and my birthday).

But Britbox? Oh that’s another beast altogether. For $6.99 monthly I get access to nearly all the classic British comedy I grew up watching on PBS as a child. My mom can watch all the murder mysteries she wants until she’s blue in the face and then some without having to wait for our local library to think about considering getting a copy in. I can watch nearly the entire back catalogue of Classic Doctor Who and then watch obscure British documentaries. Low budget made for TV British movies not released in the US? They’ve got loads. Do I want to watch Eastenders or Coronation street today?

I know to most people this isn’t really all that super. But it’s so hard to get UK programs in the states without shelling out quite a bit of money on the DVDs. PBS will only show so much for so long before getting another series to syndicate.

But most of all, I adore Britbox for one simple reason. They carry Red Dwarf. They carry Red Dwarf series 1 through 11 and I hope to hell they’ll get series 12 when it airs later this year. I can’t get enough of this show, and it’s been a personal favorite (and obscure and hard to find) since I was 9 and first saw it on PBS at 3 or 4 AM every Saturday/Sunday, when I should have been in bed. Since we first got Britbox a few months ago (June I think) husband and I have been taking at least half an hour to cuddle up and watch a show together every day. We binged daily on Red Dwarf after I learned that around the same time when I was 9 years old watching it on PBS every week he was watching also on PBS where he was in Atlanta. After we’d talked about that, we had to binge together.

Anyway, that’s the best $6.99/mo I’ve ever spent in my life. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a Keeping Up Appearances marathon to get back to.

So I have these two laptops. One of them has no usable internal storage (something I am working on dealing with) and the other is an old beast with missing keys and parts falling off. But plenty of internal storage. Both run Windows 10, but 2 different accounts (and don’t want to deal with resetting my much hated Acer Cloudbook AGAIN and deal with uninstalling the 10 gigs of bloatware AGAIN and have to deal with Powershell code fuckery AGAIN) so I can’t exactly sync them up. But I really didn’t want to do that anyway.

So, I have these two laptops. The beast machine is my main rig. I do nearly everything on it. Except watch youtube or streaming. It’s so old now that it can hardly keep up with that and it has to buffer a long while before I can watch anything. I do all of my photo editing/artistic stuff on it, and nearly all of my writing. Again, it has much more storage wise than the Cloudbook. I also listen to my music on it. But pretty much my projects are all done on that machine. The Cloudbook is my “travel laptop”. Having a much longer battery life, and weighing roughly 1-2 pounds max, it’s ideal for when I need to go to the laundromat and need something to do. I can do some of my writing on it, via GoogleDrive and Evernote. But I can’t really do anything else but watch Youtube and stream movies.

Well, I finally figured out a good use! I’ve been trying to sort out how to efficiently do my tarot reading online. It requires I have a camera of some sort. Well, being strapped for funds as I always am (we pay bills and provide for our son just fine – comfortable even – but stretching beyond that is dicey as we have a crappy car and other things that we need to be careful of and keep extra money in reserve in case of emergencies. That kind of thing) so I can’t exactly just go buy one. My mom has one she got a few years back, but half the time we can’t find it and the other half the time it’s frustrating as hell having to go through and delete all my pictures after I transfer them to my laptops. And no, I don’t own a smartphone that actually works anymore. The one I do have can only be used while plugged in, and even then I can’t move it because it’ll shut off if the cord is moved too much. So, what do I do?

I recently discovered that my current phone, an LG prepaid flip phone has Bluetooth on it. Windows 10 also has Bluetooth compatibility… provided the device it is on also has compatibility. The beast of a laptop does not have Bluetooth… but the Cloudbook does. Essentially I’m going to be using the Cloudbook for basic blogging (like this), and business related things because I can use my flip phone to take the pics I need, transfer them to the Cloudbook via Bluetooth so that I can put them into the e-mails and such that I need to do to fill in my orders when I get them, or when I do my freebie events on Tumblr.

My clunker beast will be used solely for my projects and hobbies. This will help me manage my time better as well, and will help me dicipline myself to sticking to specific tasks I’ve set out for the day. Such as “Today, I’m only going to work on my novel.” So then I’ll be using the beast all day. Or “Today’s a casual work day!” so I’ll pull out the Cloudbook for streaming while I update my blogs, process payments, do ebay, etc.